Hanging Man
The Arrest of Ai Weiwei
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
In October 2010, Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds appeared in the Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern. Six months later, he was arrested in China and held for over two months in terrible conditions. The most famous living Chinese artist and activist, Ai Weiwei is a figure of extraordinary talent, courage and integrity. From the beginning of his career, he has spoken out against the world's greatest totalitarian regime, in part by creating some of the most beautiful and mysterious artworks of our age, works which have touched millions around the world.
After Weiwei's release, Barnaby Martin dodged the secret police to interview him about his imprisonment and his intentions. Based on these interviews and Martin's own intimate connections with China, Hanging Man is an exploration of Ai Weiwei's life, art and activism. It is a rich picture of the man and his beliefs, what he is trying to communicate with his art, and of his campaign for democracy and accountability in China. It is a book about courage and hope found in the absence of freedom and justice.
'Hanging Man is the most detailed, comprehensive and eloquent English-language account of what happens these days to Chinese political prisoners . . . [an] invaluable book' Literary Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, the co-designer of the Beijing Olympics' celebrated Bird's Nest stadium whose international reputation blossomed with the Tate Modern's 2010 showing of the installation Sunflower Seeds, granted British journalist Martin (already an acquaintance of Ai's) an extensive multipart interview in the immediate aftermath of his 81-day detention by the Chinese government in April 2011. A still-dazed, but nevertheless expressive Ai, who remains under house arrest, describes the harrowing, absurd nature of his detention and interrogation by police and military personnel. The brutality of state power was nothing new to the artist; he grew up during the Cultural Revolution as the son of a famous poet and onetime friend of Mao, Ai Qing, who had fallen out of favor with the regime. Ai's account of his encounters with the Chinese police state comes in the same year as the memoir by poet Liao Yiwu (For a Song and a Hundred Songs) whom Martin interviewed only a short while before Liao left China for exile in Germany. To the credit of this engaging and timely book, Martin takes care to establish the historical, political, and artistic context of Ai's work. Martin's discussion of the current mindset and political health of the Chinese Communist Party is inevitably partial, but the book serves as an excellent introduction to Ai and the power of contemporary Chinese art. 16 pages of full-color illus.
Customer Reviews
Highly Recommended
This is a terrific book.
Centred around Ai Weiwei’s 81 days detention by the Chinese authorities, ‘Hanging Man’ is much more than just a dramatic account of his ordeal. This episode is set against the recent developments in Chinese art and also a broader Chinese historical and political context.
As a result the book is a probing analysis of the Communist Party and its dominance within China, a fascinating analysis of modern Chinese art as subversion, and also a beacon of the power of language to break chains.
The persuasive figure of Ai Weiwei dominates of course, and the book suggests that this great man’s substance (in all senses) makes him a vital figure in China’s future, as well as its recent history. A founder of the ‘Stars’ group – the original set of contemporary artists to appear after Mao’s death and the demise of the Cultural Revolution – his art is dissident yet of broad appeal. He occupies a similar role to Solzhenitzen or Shostakovitch in the USSR.
Indeed his potency is even stronger than theirs: in the most remarkable section of this book his guards and interrogators show personal warmth and goodwill to him – Ai Weiwei suggesting that they are as much victims of this Orwellian world as he. His status as questioning voice is universally accepted, more even than Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo who is still in detention.
The author Barnaby Martin personalizes the story by including his own role in the narrative – it’s a device that works entirely. We penetrate this alien environment via him, and he brings interpretive clarity to this other-wordly totalitarianism. At one point Martin and a translator are in a taxi to Tongzhou to meet a Chinese poet called Mang Ke. Martin’s description of the journey is worth the price of the book alone – thick white smog, traffic gridlock, faceless graceless architecture, freezing dispossessed people and desperate poverty – yet the humanity of the souls living in this nightmare is overpowering.
I would highly recommend this erudite yet accessible book both to those with knowledge of modern day China and those like me brought fresh to the subject from admiration for Ai Weiwei and the first fissures in the breakdown of CP rule that he may represent.